Organizational Culture Can Be Measured

POINT

Greg Besner, the CEO of CulturelQ, has spent 15 years as an entrepreneur and leader following hundreds of companies to be able to accurately measure organizational culture. CulturelQ focuses on measuring and managing organizational culture using a software package, and they have found, over time, what they believe are 10 indicators that help a company assess their organizational cultures (especially the mission and values aspect). Besner suggests that companies should assess all of the following:

1. Communication, including employee voice and downward communication from leaders

2. Innovation, including employee creativity and organizational receptiveness to new ideas

3. Agility including employee perceptions of whether the organization adapts to changes

4. Wellness, including the mental and physical well-being of employees

5.Environment, including the comfort and usability of the office space

6. Collaboration, including how well employees work with one another

7. Support, including the assistance that employees get from their supervisors, coworkers and organization as a whole

8. Performance orientation, including role clarity, rewards, and employee recognition

9. Responsibility, including employee accountability and autonomy

10. Mission and values, including awareness and implementation Beyond Besner's approach,a variety of other researchers and practitioners have claimed to assess organizational culture accurately.Primarily, they have used surveys and interviews to assess organizational culture and have amassed evidence that the surveys and interviews measure what they should and measure them consistently.One example of these measures asks employees to respond to questions related to the dimensions of organizational culture discussed at the beginning of the chapter (the same "objective factors " listed in Exhibit 16-6) and to compare how their stance on these values aligns with those of the organization.

COUNTERPOINT

Can something so complex, so deep, and so difficult to define clearly be measured by asking someone about his or her organization's culture in an interview or a survey? Probably not, according to some researchers. As Professor John Traphagan notes, the problem with the term culture' is that it tends to essentialize groups: It simplistically represents a group of people as a unified whole that share simple common values, ideas, practices, and beliefs." Not only does it reduce complex systems to unified wholes, organizational culture is also deterministic, meaning that it is a given, complete entity that changes slowly and tends to have a strong, straightforward effect on behavior . But the reality is that these assumptions are probably not grounded.

The survey measures and interviews that are employed to assess organizational culture often fail to "meet the mark" because either they assess other phenomena that we inappropriately call culture" (e.g., communication, performance, attitudes, etc.) or they do not fully capture the deep complexities of organizational culture. For example, should organizational culture assessments focus on myths? Stories? Values? Behavior ? Artifacts? Beliefs? Underlying assumptions? Although it is easy to see how values, behavior , and beliefs can be assessed with surveys, it is perhaps very difficult to make sense of the organization's stories , artifacts, and underlying assumptions Furthermore, how can we distinguish reliably between the effect of subcultures or the national culture and the overall culture as a whole?

A final issue can be found in what we should measure. As can be seen throughout this chapter many different forms of organizational culture and dimensions have been forwarded by organizational behavior researchers over many decades Which ones are correct? The answer to this question plays into the question of how we should measure organizational culture . It seems clear that, although organizational cultures appear to be real and to influence people, it is incredibly difficult to "measure" them.

1. Summarize and compare both point and counterpoint.

2. Express your opinion/take and which argument do you agree with (point or counterpoint)? Justify it and make your argument.

3. Sum up your discussion.